Your Content Distribution Strategy: Our Step-By-Step Guide

Great content is useless if nobody’s reading it.

It’s extremely important to have a content distribution strategy because it boosts your impact – and who doesn’t want that?

By implementing a content distribution strategy, you can properly align your team who actually create and share the content. If you have a large company, you may have several writers, designers and editors, so all parties need to collaborate effectively to make the end result successful.

We also recommend setting goals and benchmarks to measure the performance of your distribution efforts.

Read on to find out how to go about creating a solid content distribution strategy.

Step 1: Research Your Target Audience

If you don’t understand where your audience consumes content, you’ll find it very hard to get their attention.

As previously mentioned, content distribution is all about getting your target audience to see your content.

Therefore, you must thoroughly research who and where your content will be consumed, as well as what type of content resonates with them the most.

Start by looking at your website analytics and collating them with your email subscribers, social followers and customers.

The important metrics to take into consideration should be the same as any other marketing strategy:

Age

Gender

Income

Location

Education

And any other related categories.

Collect feedback directly from your customers, email subscribers and social followers by sending them surveys. Incentivise this if you need to.

Next, collate the data to make a buyer persona. These will be your ideal target consumers who you will target with your content.

Step 2: Audit Your Content

Log your content, assess its impact and identify the gaps.

Performing an audit on all your existing content will help you to understand what style of content has and hasn’t worked in the past. This will also avoid the risk of duplicating content.

A thorough audit is comprised of three main parts:

1.Logging your content. This can be done manually or with a tool.

2.Assessing the impact of your content. By crawling your content with tools such as SEM Rush, you can assess the length, social share and backlinks attributed to your content.

3.Identifying the gaps. By performing keyword research you can discover new keywords and phrases to add to your content distribution strategy, helping your content to rank higher in search engines.

Step 3: Choose Your Content Distribution Channels

The channels you decide to share on need to align with your audience.

The channels you choose to distribute your content on could be considered more important to your content distribution strategy than the content itself. Once you know your target audience, you’ll have a much better idea of how to get your content in front of them.

Whichever channels you decide to distribute on, ensure they align with your audience’s preference and behaviours.

Be sure to optimise your owned distribution channels, such as a website or blog, as these are relatively inexpensive and are under your control in your content distribution strategy.

Step 4: Decide on Your Content Type

Repurpose long-form content into micro-content.

Now you can decide what type of content you are going to create.

A great way to create many pieces of content is by creating one piece of long-form content and then re-purposing this for different channels in the form of micro-content.

Don’t forget about the other forms of content we’ve discussed earlier in this guide, and think about how you can re-purpose and distribute these too.

Step 5: Set Your Content Distribution KPIs and Goals

Goals help you to determine your success.

Setting clear goals will help you to determine the success of your content distribution strategy.

Metrics may vary by channel, so be sure to choose the metrics that are best suited to demonstrate each channel’s success. It may take a few months before you’re able to establish a baseline for each channel.

Step 6: Create a Content Calendar

Content calendars keep your team focused and aligned.

If you want your content distribution strategy to be successful, you must plan. You can create content calendars in a simple Excel spreadsheet, although there are other tools available that do the same.

Content calendars are also good for keeping your content team focused and aligned.

Step 7: Create your Content

Time to get creative!

Now it’s time to create your blog, graphic, video, or whatever you have been planning to share.

The type of content you create will depend on the research you have previously undertaken and the resources you have available to you.

Step 8: Distribute

Don’t forget to optimise your content for each channel.

Now show the world what you’ve created.

Following your content calendar, start scheduling and publishing your content–and don’t forget to optimise your content for each channel you are posting on.